Pundits and political scientists have already expended countless joules of intellectual energy to explain Trump’s election, with economic insecurity among the more popular answers. But several researchers who have pored over the data have concluded that anxiety over lost jobs and closed factories didn’t propel Trump into office.

It is possible—and necessary—to loudly condemn the racism essential to Trump’s rise, the racism his voters articulated and countenanced, while simultaneously building a broad political movement that targets if not those very voters, then ones very much like them who stayed home on election day. However, doing so requires abandoning the most comforting liberal narratives about the right and its supporters.

Of course, presidents and their staffs have been complaining about the press long before the advent of Twitter or television. Usually, they gripe to reporters privately while accepting that the intense scrutiny is part of the job. “Welcome to the major leagues,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama communications advisor, in an email.

Trump’s ascent would not have been possible without the years of vitriol that the right-wing media directed at his predecessor. After years of listening to anti-Obama vitriol from right-wing talk radio and television hosts, conservatives wanted someone who could match that hate. They found him. And today, he’s the president.

Trump responded to the polls this morning in the most Trumpian way possible: by re-whining the story of how the system is rigged against the racist, misogynist white male trust fund kid-turned-adult billionaire who, despite no previous experience in government or the military, and a lack of coherent policy proposals, was elected president.

We had all better get used to hearing from Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, who comically attempts to explain away Trump’s years-long “birther” crusade against Barack Obama’s legitimacy by lying about it.

Fake news is the one thing Trump hasn’t claimed to have invented that he actually deserves at least partial credit for inventing. Trump puts out so much misinformation he is a fake news factory unto himself, an artisan of lies, a curator of untruths.

J.D. Vance thinks that hillbilly clannishness and self-pitying pessimism are personally and politically crippling. “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society.”

It seems we are in the throes of another of those periods when the “paranoid style in American politics,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it in a groundbreaking essay, is ascendant. No nefarious act, no multilayered conspiracy, is too bizarre, too complex or too ridiculous for some to believe.

I have no idea how to “heal” woman hating and no desire to “come together” with the Klan. So what now? Well, now those of us who feel the same way must make it a priority to get off our assets and vote in 2018. And in the meantime, resist.

But what we are seeing in Trump is something else entirely — an utterly amoral willingness to feed and exploit a frightened paranoia unhinged from anything resembling reality. That’s why ultimately, the biggest object of concern here is not Trump, but his believers.

It’s still one person’s word against another. While emails show that Hillary Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal did share story tips about Barack Obama with McClatchy’s former bureau chief James Asher, the emails aren’t conclusive that Blumenthal was the source of the “birther” tip.

On the day that Donald Trump finally acknowledge that President Obama was born in the United States and that the GOP nominee can’t win without declaring “victory” and attempting to terminally muddy the waters on the issue that made him a conservative hero, the president’s approval hit 54 percent in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

The Trump campaign released a lie-filled statement that sought to put to rest criticism of Donald Trump for building his political image on racist, conspiratorial claims that President Obama was not born in the United States.

“I’m going to have a big announcement on it today,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network, a day after he refused in a newspaper interview to say whether he believed Obama was born in the United States.

In an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News Tuesday night, GOP nominee Donald Trump was asked whether he felt his incorrect claims of President Obama being born in Africa have hurt him with black voters. Trump couldn’t seem to understand why that might be the case.

You’ve probably never heard it mentioned on TV, but President Obama is outdoing President Reagan in what used to be one of conservatives’ favorite ways to judge the economy — private sector jobs. At the current pace more than 10 million private sector jobs will be created in Obama’s second term, well over a half million more […]

“Barack Obama does not define the terror issue clearly. Here’s why.” So began a bizarre rant from Bill O’Reilly on his show last night, in which the Fox News anchor accused the president of not addressing ISIS because of his sympathies to the religion distorted by the Islamic State.